Down Nestles Lane

According to reports, Nestlé is to cut 16,000 jobs over the next two years:

The Swiss conglomerate, which owns brands including KitKat and San Pellegrino, said the cuts will include 12,000 white-collar roles, driving savings of 1bn Swiss francs (£940m).

The number of job losses is a global figure and the impact on UK jobs is unclear, but Sky News originally reported it as if every Nestlé employee in the UK (where the company employs 7,500 people) could lose their jobs.

A mea culpa quickly followed, but if you’re wondering why this should interest me it’s because my father spent his entire career working for Nestlé and years before he died (in 2014) he left some notes that came in handy for the eulogy I gave at his funeral:

After National Service he joined Nestlé as a management trainee at the company’s large confectionary factory in Hayes, Middlesex. He spent ten years there with training stints in Switzerland, France, Germany and the USA until he was appointed assistant factory manager responsible for all the chocolate and confectionary production.

In 1965 he was transferred to Nestlé’s UK head office in Croydon – a three-hour round trip from the family home in Maidenhead. In 1969 he was put in charge of two factories in Dundee. Unfortunately part of the brief was to shut down the main factory in the centre of the city with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Although this was completed entirely through voluntary redundancy my father found it an extremely traumatic experience.

In 1978 Nestlé moved my father to Cumbria. He was told to make a go of a factory at Milnthorpe near Kendal or shut it down. He kept it going so Nestle asked him to breathe new life into a factory in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He was factory manager at Ashbourne for eight years until 1987 (when he underwent a second heart operation that ultimately ended his career). During this time he was offered the manager’s job at Hayes, Nestlé’s biggest UK factory, where he had started all those years ago.

Globally Nestlé employ around 277,000 people. The company currently has twelve factories and three distribution centres in the UK and Ireland but sadly they don’t include any of the factories my father managed and, with one exception, kept open. (He considered it a failure if a factory closed without every effort being made to keep it going, not least because of the impact on the local community.)

The stories behind these factories reflect the history of British manufacturing in the 20th century, and it’s a bit sad.

Take Keiller’s, for example. The Keiller family opened their first marmalade factory in Dundee in 1797. In the 1920s Keiller & Sons was purchased by Crosse & Blackwell which was acquired by Nestlé in 1960. There were two Keiller factories in Dundee, manufacturing confectionary as well as marmalade. One was closed by Nestlé in 1971. The second was shut down in 1992, at which point the company (which Nestlé had sold in the early Eighties) ceased to exist.

The Milnthorpe factory near Kendall, which was owned by Libby’s, an American company, until its acquisition by Nestlé in 1970, opened in 1934 and closed in 1995. It manufactured dairy products, including condensed milk, and Libby’s orange juice. Today the site is a small industrial estate.

Opened in 1912, the Ashbourne factory produced instant coffee, rice pudding, and canned milk products before closing in 2003. The factory was demolished in 2006 and replaced by housing plus some light industrial and retail units.

Even the flagship chocolate factory in Hayes, where my father began his career in the Fifties, has gone. Built in 1913, and expanded over several decades, it closed in 2014 and the brown field site is currently being redeveloped as Hayes Village with 1,500 new homes. All that remains of the factory is the art deco entrance that was added, somewhat incongruously, in the Sixties.

I don’t remember ever visiting the Hayes factory, but I do remember watching my father play tennis at what may (or may not) have been the Nestlé social club. That would have been in the mid Sixties, when I was five or six. I don’t think it was anywhere near the factory, though, because what I remember – quite vividly – is a large clubhouse surrounded by acres of trees, grass … and tennis courts. But I may be wrong.

The Hayes factory was founded by Eugen Sandow, who was both a chocolatier and a ‘pioneering bodybuilder’. Sandow’s Cocoa Works was subsequently bought by Hayes Cocoa Company which sold it to Nestlé in 1929, whereupon it became the first factory outside Switzerland to manufacture Nestlé’s Milky Bar. Later it also produced coffee products, including the world’s first instant coffee which was launched, after eight years’ research, in 1939.

The Hayes factory closed in 2014 but in December 2023 a ten-storey mural celebrating the life of Eugen Sandow was unveiled on the site.

Also gone is the Croydon head office where my father worked from 1965 to 1969 before he was sent to Dundee. Completed in 1964, it’s a typically ugly Sixties office block that sits above a shopping arcade.

In 2012 Nestlé moved its UK HQ to Gatwick. Thirteen years later Nestle Tower is still vacant. It was covered by scaffolding for four years following ill-fated plans to redevelop it as a housing project. According to reports the scaffolding was due to removed last year but the plans are no further forward and it’s not clear who currently owns it.

I should add that when I was a child I didn’t know anyone, not even my father, who called the company Nestlé. It was always Nestles, hence Nestles Lane in Hayes where the chocolate factory used to be. Talking of which, my father’s first job at Hayes was as a chocolate taster, but I don’t remember us eating Nestles chocolate at home. I wasn’t keen on Milky Bars either so it was always Cadbury’s Dairy Milk or Rowntree’s Aero for me.

As it happens, my father’s favourite confectionary were After Eight mints which were made by Rowntree from 1962 to 1988 when the company was bought, ironically, by Nestlé. Today, as a result of that acquisition, two of Nestlé’s remaining UK factories are in York, home of Rowntree.

After moving to Derbyshire in 1980, my father declined offers to return to Hayes (as factory manager) and head office in Croydon where I imagine he would have had a senior role. In his words, he didn’t want to return to the “over-crowded” south, but there was one job he did covet - manager of the Staverton factory near Trowbridge in Wiltshire where Nestlé Cereals currently produce breakfast cereals including Shredded Wheat and Shreddies.

However, he knew and liked the incumbent manager, and didn’t want to lobby for a job that was already occupied, so he stayed at the Ashbourne factory until his retirement, on medical grounds following two heart operations, in 1989. He was 59.

These days it’s less common for someone to work for one company for their entire working life, but I don’t think my father regretted it. He had offers, he once told me, that would have substantially increased his income, but after we moved to Scotland quality of life became more important to him than career advancement or money – hence my parents’ subsequent move to the edge of the Lake District, and then the Peak District where they lived for over 40 years.

I know too that they were grateful to Nestlé for the company’s understanding and support when my father’s health deteriorated. Big corporations often get criticised when it comes to employee relations, sometimes with justification, but in my father’s case Nestlé treated him very well.

It’s a tough old world, and no-one can be guaranteed a job for life, but I hope the 16,000 workers whose jobs are now under threat are handled with the same dignity and respect.